Friday, December 21, 2012

The Secret of Setting New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep

With 2013 right around the corner, on January 1 or soon
thereafter, there’s going to be a lot of people either starting a low-carb diet
for the very first time, or they will be returning after regaining part or all
of their prior weight loss. Unfortunately, most of those people won’t stick
around for very long.

They’ll probably drift away by Valentine’s Day because New
Year’s Resolutions are harder to keep than they realized.

Want to know why?

The truth is, sticking to a diet plan – any diet plan – won’t
work very well (including a low-carb diet) if it’s your latest attempt at self-improvement.
That’s right. Trying to self improve doesn’t work. It’s negative and painful,
and we always try to avoid discomfort. That’s programmed into us. We are
literally programmed to seek after pleasure and avoid all forms of pain.

Don’t believe me? WATCH yourself sometime. WATCH your family
interact with each other. WATCH your friends, and WATCH people you don’t know.
Just plop yourself down on a bench at the mall or eavesdrop on the couple over
at the next table the next time you go out to dinner. LISTEN to the people you
work with when they talk. LISTEN and just WATCH people.

You’ll learn more about our initial infant and childhood
programming and conditioning that controls our everyday behavior and reactions than
you ever wanted know.

Most New Year’s Resolutions Focus on What We Don’t Like
About Ourselves

In fact, I’m willing to bet that – for most of us – that’s why we’re on a low-carb diet. Because there’s something about ourself that we don’t like.

Regardless of the general low-carb mantra that says, “It’s
not a diet; it’s a lifestyle,” and regardless of the general low-carb mantra
that insists that following a low-carb diet is about regaining health, few of
us truly believe that. It’s taken me literally years to wrap my brain around
that Truth. We aren’t doing low carb to improve our health. We’re doing low
carb to fix something we don’t like. We’re doing low carb because we want to
fix something about ourselves that we believe is wrong.

Am I right?

Common New Year’s Resolutions

There’s far more resolutions than I could ever list in a
single blog post, but these are just a few:

weight loss through dieting

buying a gym membership, or a set of weights

plans to quit smoking

trying to lessen stress or control anger

commit to be more organized

try to make more money

plan to get out of debt

All of them are negative things that we don’t like about
ourselves, things that maybe other people have mentioned that we should fix
about ourselves. Could that be why only 8 percent of those who ever make a New
Year’s Resolution are able to keep them? Could that be why less than half of the
American population even bother with setting annual goals?

We are programmed to break them. We are programmed to fight
against anything that causes restriction, discomfort, insecurity, fear, and
pain.

So What’s the Secret? Seeking After Pleasure?

I suppose that we could travel to the other side of the
pendulum and seek after things that are pleasurable. We could seek after things
that make us happy. If we decide to do that, those goals and resolutions would
be much easier to keep:

spend more time with family, rather than on yourself

take a class at your local community college

read a book you’ve been wanting to read

plan an exciting vacation or weekend

start a new hobby or business venture

take the kids to the park regularly

go to a movie once a month with your spouse

Depending on our inner beliefs and attitudes, we would be far
less likely to break those types of resolutions than we would were they to
cause us discomfort. But unless we remain extremely aware, our negative
programming (the suggestions in our lives that we have accepted without experimenting
with them for ourselves) could raise its ugly head and ruin it all.

The Secret of the Middle Path

Extremes are never helpful. Think about a child whose
parents give him or her everything they desire. What happens? They turn into a
tyrant, a bully, a selfish adult who doesn’t know how to tolerate even a speck
of discomfort. That’s because a lack of opposition in our lives can be just as destructive
as too much.

We need an opposing force. We need something working against
us in order to polish away the roughness. We need life to be just the way it
is. So perhaps the whole business of setting goals and resolutions is what’s
wrong with the process, because a goal is always attached to an ideal. And
ideals always provide disappointment and frustration when things don’t turn out
the way that we hoped.

Now, that is the real reason why people leave a low-carb diet,
isn’t it?

You start off in January with a ton of excitement, hoping
that you can finally correct what is wrong with yourself, but something goes
wrong. A few weeks down the road, you discover that the diet doesn’t work as
well as it did for others. Your weight loss is moving along at a crawl, or
maybe there is no weight loss at all. Maybe, you’ve even gained a few pounds.

So we start to think of ourselves as a failure. We are
disappointed because our ideal didn’t bear fruit. Sometimes, we feel angry and
deceived. Sometimes, we feel like it’s our fault. And sometimes, we begin to
encounter even stronger forces of opposition because when we’re different or
when something doesn’t work for us that worked for someone else, it makes them feel uncomfortable.

The Key Lies Within Our Subconscious Minds

THE KEY to making New Year’s Resolutions is to first recognize
that discomfort is going to surface in our lives from time to time. We need to accept
that discomfort for what it is, and move on. Put your focus somewhere else. Because
the Truth is, the discomfort doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we
stop fighting life and begin asking, “What is life trying to teach me?”

“What does life want me to know?”

What am I doing that is causing me to forget who and what I am? What am I doing that is causing me to make carbohydrates so important in my
life?

What we believe is True when coupled with strong emotion is
what will come true. That’s how powerful our subconscious mind is.

So the secret to setting New Year’s Resolutions that you can
keep isn’t found in fighting against our subconscious minds. It isn’t found in
setting up unrealistic goals. It isn’t found within the various plans for
self-improvement or even diets that make us all sorts of wild promises that may or may not
happen.

The SECRET is found in reprogramming ourselves
to let go of all of the false beliefs that have brought us to this very moment
of existence. The SECRET is to let go, and let LIFE FLOW…

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Vickie Ewell has been writing online since 2007. She first began writing for Suite 101 where she was the feature writer and topic editor for their autism section. She is also the author of the autism section at Health Mango. Currently, she writes for several online writing sites, including Infobarrel and Textbroker. She has several blogs that address the problems and concerns for those with celiac disease, dairy allergies, low-carb weight loss, eating on a budget, online writing, and spirituality. She has extensive experience in working with people who have disabilities and spent several years as a culinary specialist for several boys' homes until she had to quit due to celiac disease. In her free time, she enjoys gluten-free recipe creation, researching health topics, and spending time with the hubby.